granted them.  In the funeral procession it was perceived that, besides the two ladies, there were two other persons whom no one knew.  Upon being asked who they were, they replied they were poor priests in need of protection; and that, having learnt two Duchesses were to be present at the funeral, they had come to the convent for the purpose of imploring their good offices.  When they were presented to them, the young ladies said they would interrogate them after the service in their chambers.  The young priests waited upon them at the time appointed, and stayed there until the evening.  The Abbess, who began to think their audience was too long, sent to beg the priests would retire.  One of them seemed very melancholy, but the other laughed as if he would burst his sides.  This was the Duc de Richelieu; the other was the Chevalier de Guemene, the younger son of the Duke of that name.  The gentlemen themselves divulged the adventure.

The King’s illegitimate children, fearing that they should be treated in the same way as the Princes of the blood, have for some months past been engaged in drawing a strong party of the nobility to their side, and have presented a very unjust petition against the Dukes and Peers.  My son has refused to receive this petition, and has interdicted them from holding assemblies, the object of which he knows would tend to revolt.  They have, nevertheless, continued them at the instigations of the Duc du Maine and his wife, and have even carried their insolence so far as to address a memorial to my son and another to the Parliament, in which they assert that it is within the province of the nobility alone to decide between the Princes of the blood and the legitimated Princes.  Thirty of them have signed this memorial, of whom my son has had six arrested; three of them have been sent to the Bastille, and the other three to Vincennes; they are mm. de Chatillon, de Rieux, de Beaufremont, de Polignac, de Clermont, and d’O.  The last was the Governor of the Comte de Toulouse, and remains with him.  Clermont’s wife is one of the Duchesse de Berri’s ladies.  She is not the most discreet person in the world, and has been long in the habit of saying to any one who would listen to her, “Whatever may come of it, my husband and I are willing to risk our lives for the Comte de Toulouse.”  It is therefore evident that all this proceeds from the bastards.  But I must expose still further the ingratitude of these people.  Chatillon is a poor gentleman, whose father held a small employment under M. Gaston, one of those offices which confer the privilege of the entree to the antechambers, and the holders of which do not sit in the carriage with their masters.  The two descendants, as they call themselves, of the house of Chatillon, insist that this Chatillon, who married an attorney’s daughter, is descended from the illegitimate branches of that family.  His son was a subaltern in the Body Guard.  In the summer time, when the young officers went to